David Peters is an Assistant Professor of sociology at Iowa State University.  His research areas focus on rural poverty, biofuels development, entrepreneurship, and community economic development.  His work on biofuels explores the community economic and social impacts of ethanol production in the Midwest, with a focus on issues of economic development and public financing. His work on community economic development looks at why certain communities are better at using their resource endowments (natural, economic, social, etc.) to promote economic development than other similar communities. Prior to joining the Iowa State faculty, Dr. Peters was as an Assistant Professor of agricultural economics and Extension Rural Development Specialist at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.  Dr. Peters has a Ph.D. and M.S. in rural sociology from the University of Missouri, and a B.S. cum laude in sociology from the University of Minnesota.  He also studied urban and regional affairs at the University of Oslo in Norway.

Nancy Hodur is a Research Scientist in the Department of Agribusiness and Applied Economics at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota.  In the past 7 years Hodur has done research on numerous projects related to rural economic development, economic impact assessments, community development, and natural resources.  She has been very involved in the NDSU/MBI Biomaterials Initiative, a project aimed at the commercialization of cellulosic nanofibers as a valuable co-product of a commercial biorefinery.                     

David Swenson is an associate scientist in economics at Iowa State University and a lecturer there in community and regional planning as well as in the graduate program in urban and regional planning at The University of Iowa.    His primary area of research focuses on regional economic changes and their fiscal and demographic implications for communities.  He has completed scores of economic and fiscal impact studies in Iowa, and he has written and presented extensively on the uses of impact models for decision making.  He has also researched and written widely on local government finance issues, economic development and public funding of business development.    Of late, he has focused on the potential community economic outcomes associated with biofuels development in the Midwest and the Plains.